“Financial professionals spend about 80 percent of their time managing data, and only about 20 percent of their time generating excess return for each giving unit of risk.” In this video from MarketsWiki Education’s World of Opportunity event in New York, Joe Gits, CEO of Social Market Analytics, breaks down how unstructured data can benefit your trading. Social media posts, news articles and blogs are all sources of potential market moving information. The trick is parsing through all of the data and using it to your advantage. Gits reveals how market participants can stay ahead of the curve using unstructured…

Can you trade off of Twitter? The Chicago Board Options Exchange and its partner Social Market Analytics (SMA) believe so. The two firms are partnering on a suite of sentiment-based indexes that use tweet data to generate alpha. The first of the suite, the CBOE-SMA Large-Cap Index (SMLC Index), debuted on July 29. The index is simply published by CBOE at this point, but a tradeable contract may be coming. Joe Gits, CEO and co-founder of SMA, has been watching and monitoring Twitter for years. Gits has a background in quantitative analytics, and, soon after Twitter debuted in 2006, Gits…

FinTech Exchange Chicago 2015, hosted by Barchart, was held on April 23 and featured a host of great speakers. Scroll down to see the “Best of the Lightning Round” video, or several of the full presentations. To see the full layout and design: click HERE.

Today’s financial technology dialog is often about a word you don’t usually associate with it – democracy – bringing software, data, reporting, testing and trading to the masses. And it’s not just one size for everyone – its customizable too. At the FinTech Exchange 2015 Chicago event, 13 firm executives spoke during its lightning round and one prevailing theme was the shift in technology from “tools you can use” to “tools that help you design what you want.” Drew Shields, director of product management at Trading Technologies, said that his firm is more focused on using a variety of technology…

John J. Lothian & Company, Inc. is pleased to announce today the creation of a Chicago-based industry-wide summer intern education series to introduce the history, innovation, key leaders and future opportunities to participating interns, summer workers, new employees and those interested in careers in the trading and markets. The series, which kicks off on July 16, features presentations from a select group of industry leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, attorneys, technologists, investors, traders and other industry participants. The series will start on July 16, with an event featuring Leo Melamed speaking about his experience and philosophy of growing global markets. The kickoff…